Quote from: jhkim;580400Basically, it seems like there are two kinds of metagame here:

1) Make sure that all threats have suitable warning signs on them such that the players can know the danger and avoid it.  If the players don't read the signals right, then they screwed up and may be killed.  

2) Make sure that threats aren't such that they are challenging but won't automatically overwhelm the party.  If the players aren't smart about being prepared and dealing well with the threats, then they screwed up and may be killed.  


The point of both of these are "fair challenge" - i.e. avoiding the situation where the PCs are beaten without having a fair chance.  Both of #1 and #2 can sometimes be justified as logical outcomes of the world.  However, ultimately I think that world logic will sometimes lead to unfair situations where PCs die even though they did the right thing.  A true wild world won't always have warning signs, just like it won't always have balanced encounters.  

As I said in an early post, I tend to prefer tactical challenges to challenges of reading the GM's cues.  Thus, I usually prefer #2, but I don't mind some of #1.

I think this is exactly right.  Tomorrow, on my way to work, even if I'm doing everything right and driving safely, there's no guarantee that a long-haul rig won't cross the median and slam into my car before I have a chance to react, killing me instantly.  

That's not fair, but it happens because this is the 'real world'.  

Given enough PCs and enough time, this kinds of tragedies would be unavoidable in a 'real' world.  Metagame concerns help make the world fun and remove the spectre of meaningless and 'unfair' death.  That doesn't mean that death can't happen - or that it might end up being somewhat unfair - but the DM is deliberately making the world just a little less 'randomly' dangerous than our world, even though they're putting in 'random monsters' and 'demon lords'.

Quote from: Benoist;580398If you are exploring a complex at level 1 and discovered a Clay Golem that is dormant, linked to some kind of alchemical placenta that seems made of sandy matter, and you decide to disturb it by hacking through its crucible or poking at it to "see what it does", you are suicidal, and should be killed as a natural result of your stupidity.

How are player characters, especially low level ones, meant to distinguish between a dormant Clay Golem and just another statue? And why should they assume it is hostile? Maybe it's a helpful butler golem and activating is one of the keys to get through the level safely?

Of course I may be reading too much into this example. There may have been other context related clues that will warn player character about wary away from the golem in question, but there will be other occasion in which poking something to see what it does is exactly what the module expects you to do and if really if you're going to be such a 'fraidy cat, scared to touch anything you see what the hell are you doing in a dungeon in the first place?

Just to note, I am fine with characters dying due to bad luck. I have had characters die to bad luck, a lot. Killed by an ogre. Fell into a pit. Shot in the back by a party member and later killed by the death touch of an evil priestess because of those three hit points. So it goes.

They make for interesting war stories. After a few levels, these accidents happen less often.

Quote from: Melan;580406Just to note, I am fine with characters dying due to bad luck. I have had characters die to bad luck, a lot. Killed by an ogre. Fell into a pit. Shot in the back by a party member and later killed by the death touch of an evil priestess because of those three hit points. So it goes.

They make for interesting war stories. After a few levels, these accidents happen less often.

Oh, yeah.  I play a lot of Call of Cthulhu, where bad luck deaths  - and even no-chance unfair deaths - can happen pretty regularly.  I'm OK with this depending on how its handled.  

However, if given the choice of the two kinds of imposed fairness (i.e. "Fair Warning" and "Fair Encounter"), I generally prefer the latter.  

A lot of people seem to like a setup where there is always fair warning for any dangerous encounter - but I generally feel like that means I have to read cues from the GM, and I prefer a tactical challenge to a read-the-GM challenge.

Quote from: Soylent Green;580403How are player characters, especially low level ones, meant to distinguish between a dormant Clay Golem and just another statue? And why should they assume it is hostile? Maybe it's a helpful butler golem and activating is one of the keys to get through the level safely?

Of course I may be reading too much into this example. There may have been other context related clues that will warn player character about wary away from the golem in question, but there will be other occasion in which poking something to see what it does is exactly what the module expects you to do and if really if you're going to be such a 'fraidy cat, scared to touch anything you see what the hell are you doing in a dungeon in the first place?

Yes, you are reading too much in the example: it was predicated on our knowledge here of what a clay golem is, how it compares to PCs, and the way it'd show up in an actual game might include a lot of other components that could show the PCs that the creature is potentially a great threat.

Besides, there are ways you could devise to poke at stuff from a safe distance, behind an opened door you could slam, or with the group at a safe distance, convincing some other creature to do your bidding for you, etc etc. Playing the game involves coming up with ingenious ways to do what it is you want to do without risking total annihilation for a mistake in judgment.

To answer your question now, why are mercenaries going to warzones when they can blow up when landing on a mine, or more ubiquitously, get somewhere where they could meet someone who'd fire at them with a gun? You get to dangerous places for a variety of reasons, the most enduring D&D one being the prospects of striking it rich. But staying alive requires some amount of daring, as well as caution. Making sense of the environment and situations you find yourself in, and making decisions from there as to the course of action you wish to take (i.e. which elements to investigate, others to avoid, others to confront, and how, etc.) is part of the draw of the game. If you aren't ready to make decisions and you assume all situations will play the same "because that's what is to be expected, otherwise it wouldn't be 'fair'," you are in for a big surprise.

Jhkim has the right of it.

Consider how you mix stuff up in a no level based game where PCs emerge from the character build process with a far more ranged ability set. Traveller is a classic example but V&V does it and so do a few others.
In this case you do not feel the need to set up level appropriate opponents. You just have opponents, the mooks that the Colonel Evil uses are pretty much soldiers but his 2 Lieutenants Grabit and Scarpa are tough hombres. When the party encounter them if American Maid and Arthur can deal with the mooks so The Tick can deal with eh tough guys we are good but if they can't see that coming then the moth and the cleaning girl are in trouble.

The idea of setting an advenutre because of the level of the party is a meta concept. It might well be a good meta concept but its still a meta concept.

Quote from: jibbajibba;580420Jhkim has the right of it.

Consider how you mix stuff up in a no level based game where PCs emerge from the character build process with a far more ranged ability set. Traveller is a classic example but V&V does it and so do a few others.
In this case you do not feel the need to set up level appropriate opponents. You just have opponents, the mooks that the Colonel Evil uses are pretty much soldiers but his 2 Lieutenants Grabit and Scarpa are tough hombres. When the party encounter them if American Maid and Arthur can deal with the mooks so The Tick can deal with eh tough guys we are good but if they can't see that coming then the moth and the cleaning girl are in trouble.

The idea of setting an advenutre because of the level of the party is a meta concept. It might well be a good meta concept but its still a meta concept.

Hey! Don't sell American Maid short. She will clean your clock mister.

Quote from: Sommerjon;580263How the hell is it 'organic' to start the PCs out in a relatively safe area of the world, having less dangerous dungeons more close by?

You 'populate' the sandbox with level based areas then give hints/hooks on which areas are which allowing the PCs to make meta game decisions based upon that knowledge.
- the old abandoned mine to the West. Word is that the goblins that have been stealing goats & sheep are hold up there.
- The ruined keep to the South. People say that those who get too close are never seen again. JoBob the grain merchant says that he saw a bunch of ogres near that place once. He ran for his life!
- The mountains to the North are said to be home to a tribe of hill giants. The folks up that way give them a lot of livestock to get left alone.

How the hell is this NOT organic?  You're born in Ohio; you find out over the course of your life that to the north there's a nation of excessively polite people, then further up an icy wasteland; to the south there's some backwater areas that don't always take kindly to northerners, then further south a foreign nation that has some ancient ruins but is also currently overwhelmed by drug wars.  Far off across treacherous oceans there's currently a wartorn region where soldiers from your nation are fighting a difficult battle against insurgents that like to hide in caves.  You can choose to pay to go on a very safe and comfortable huge boat with all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets, or you can try to sail around the world in a small sailboat passing through areas wracked with massive storms and other regions where pirates have frequently attacked and murdered or kidnapped people in small boats. You can choose where you go and to what level of danger you live your life.

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Quote from: jibbajibba;580347Because the Mountains of Dread are just as likely to have a number of low level predators/creatures with a few high level Apex predators as the forest of Ho-Hum unless someone cleared out the Apex predators from the forest of Ho-Hum in which case they probably cleared out the bandits as well.

In the real world, Sherwood forest was notoriously cleared of lions long before it was cleared of Merry Men.

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Quote from: jibbajibba;580420Jhkim has the right of it.

Consider how you mix stuff up in a no level based game where PCs emerge from the character build process with a far more ranged ability set. Traveller is a classic example but V&V does it and so do a few others.
In this case you do not feel the need to set up level appropriate opponents. You just have opponents, the mooks that the Colonel Evil uses are pretty much soldiers but his 2 Lieutenants Grabit and Scarpa are tough hombres. When the party encounter them if American Maid and Arthur can deal with the mooks so The Tick can deal with eh tough guys we are good but if they can't see that coming then the moth and the cleaning girl are in trouble.

The idea of setting an advenutre because of the level of the party is a meta concept. It might well be a good meta concept but its still a meta concept.

Agreed. Which is why I don't do it.   What I don't get is why people seem to be thinking here that in a level-based game you're doing this one way or the other; that's just not the case.

In my D&D games, my players are free to go face things far beneath them if they really want, or to seek out things far beyond their capacities if they're crazy or foolish enough to.  And sometimes, they might go into the Forest of Doom and have the incredible luck (good or bad, depending on how you see it) of not finding anything more dangerous than a wart-hog in days and days of travel, or of wandering into the Forest of Mild Inconvenience in search of kobolds and ending up having a very unlikely but still possible random encounter with Hill Giant.  The answer there (assuming they're not really at the Hill Giant's level) is probably "run like hell", or more ideally "try to steal the Hill Giant's sack of gold and THEN run like hell"!

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Quote from: RPGPundit;580491You can choose to pay to go on a very safe and comfortable huge boat with all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets, or you can try to sail around the world in a small sailboat passing through areas wracked with massive storms and other regions where pirates have frequently attacked and murdered or kidnapped people in small boats. You can choose where you go and to what level of danger you live your life.

You can manage risks in your life in general, but the modern-day world is vastly better mapped and cataloged and risk-assessed than the typical fantasy world.  

What we're talking about here is being able to go somewhere that you can definitely get 6th level threats, but be safe from surprise 10th level threats.  That doesn't exist in the real world.  Once you go behind enemy lines in a war zone, you're never going to have any guarantees of this sort.  The enemy is moving, and is deliberately hiding their movements from you.  You can try to reduce your risks, but you might get trapped in a fight with a much superior force.  

Quote from: Benoist;580418You get to dangerous places for a variety of reasons, the most enduring D&D one being the prospects of striking it rich. But staying alive requires some amount of daring, as well as caution. Making sense of the environment and situations you find yourself in, and making decisions from there as to the course of action you wish to take (i.e. which elements to investigate, others to avoid, others to confront, and how, etc.) is part of the draw of the game. If you aren't ready to make decisions and you assume all situations will play the same "because that's what is to be expected, otherwise it wouldn't be 'fair'," you are in for a big surprise.

The question is, would you as GM put in situations that truly aren't fair - like a deadly golem already activated as opposed to a golem that is activated if you break the glass.  In other words, sometimes there are no-win situations, and sometimes the best plans fail due to unforeseen circumstances.

I think there is avast middle ground here. You dont need something that is purely realistic. But you also dont have to just surrender to "it is a game so it should feel like a game". The realities of play sort of require that players have some ability to gauge threats they take on and gauge the relative danger of an area (and it helps to have some areas safer than others and some more dangerous). Exactly how this breaks down will vary from group to group. But simply having a forest that is more dangerous and filled with higher level threats, while having a valley that is relatively peaceful and containing more low level threats, doesn't torpedo my sense of the setting. However if everything is rigged so I am facing x number of encounters per day (all rationed out with a set number equal to party level, a set number two levels above, below and so on) that does torpedo my sense of the setting.

Stuff like dungeon levels having progressivley more dangerous creatures hasnt worked well for me in some time, but I can see why some would use it and I think there are fair rationalizations out there that would allow many players to brush off any concerns.

So many of these debates seem to focus on showing one or two exceptions of one extreme to prove you must embrace the opposite extreme.

I dont feel others have to accept my style of play. If they want the game to play with challenges tailored specifically to the party and not worry about any explanations for why that is, that is fine and a perfeclty acceptable way to play the game. But to me, setting matters a lot. It has always been a major concern for me and a big part of my enjoyment of the game. I can brush aside some stuff, but not others. Wishlists for magic items, perfectly tailored el charts, advenutres structured around a series of encounters, etc these things disrupt my sense of the setting and they always have from when I first encountered each one. Stuff like making this part of the world more dangerous, this part of the world less dangerous, and presenting the players with a believable mix of encounters (even if there is some attempt to be fair in the process) doesn't create this problem for me and adds to my experience of the game.

Quote from: RPGPundit;580493In the real world, Sherwood forest was notoriously cleared of lions long before it was cleared of Merry Men.

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But Robin Hood is a 10th level Ranger he can fuck you up much more easily than a lion.....

And the lions died out 13,000 years ago because at the end of the last ice age their main prey Mamomths and Giant deer could no longer complete for resources with migrating smaller lighter mamels moving up from the south (British Lions were huge 30% bigger than african ones). So they weren't hunted down by the lord of the manor

Quote from: jhkim;580523What we're talking about here is being able to go somewhere that you can definitely get 6th level threats, but be safe from surprise 10th level threats.  That doesn't exist in the real world.  Once you go behind enemy lines in a war zone, you're never going to have any guarantees of this sort.  The enemy is moving, and is deliberately hiding their movements from you..

You are missing the point of what the Pundit and myself are saying. Just because a RPG is level based doesn't mean that the settings made for it automatically have areas that only have Nth level threats. Areas MAY exist that happen to have a similar grouping of N levels but they would be a coincidence because of how the inhabitants stat out in the game. For example the encampment of Varangians* would have a high average  level. In GURPS they would have a high average number of points. In ShadowRun they would have earned and applied a lot of Karma.

*Varangians - elite Viking warriors in service as bodyguards to the Byzantine Emperor

Quote from: Sommerjon;580386In the past year?  Shadowrun, Alpha Omega, Dark Heresy, and Usagi Yojimbo'

So what the difference between a 10th level fighter and Street samurai who earned and applied a lot of Karma?